Okay time for my big Arc-V hot take. I see "Arc-V is about masking and suppressing your negative emotions" a lot, and while I do understand how so many people interpreted it that way, I think there's value in putting my interpretation out there.
To me, Arc-V is about toxic shame and dialectical behavioural therapy. Shame is a uniquely tricky emotion because it is the feeling of "I am unacceptable to my community, I will die because we are a social species." Feeling your emotions is generally a good thing. Anger is the feeling that you've been wronged, so feeling it can motivate you to action and get justice for yourself. Guilt is the feeling that you have done something wrong, so feeling it can motivate you to action and put right the thing you did wrong. But shame is the feeling that you yourself are inherently wrong regardless of any action you've taken or could take, so the only option shame leaves you with is curling up and dying. Shame is also the feeling you cultivate in yourself when you don't allow yourself to feel your other emotions. The real way to deal with shame is to not accept it or feel it, but to physically move to remind your body that it is alive, and then to combine the shame with self-love to reveal the real emotion that the shame was telling you not to feel.
From the very first episode, Yuya is characterised as someone who suffers from toxic shame and has done since even before his father disappeared and disgraced his name and the concept of entertainment dueling. Yusho gave him the pendulum and the advice about smiling to pull him out of his shame spirals and allow him to take action towards fixing whatever bad situation he's in. The pendulum is a reminder of the movement Yuya should be doing, and the smile advice is a reminder of the goal Yuya should be moving towards. It's not about masking his negative emotions, it's about acknowledging the negative emotions and finding a reason to smile regardless. Which brings us to dialectical behavioural therapy.
My go-to example for how dialectics work is after a bad breakup, maybe with someone who was abusive, being left with the contradictory feelings of "I still love this person because of the good I saw in them" and "I hate this person for mistreating me." The default reaction is usually to get tunnel-visioned on only one of those feelings and ignoring the other because of its apparent incompatibility with the other. Either you hold onto your love for them and ignore the feelings of being wronged, or you hold onto your hatred for them and ignore the feelings of still caring about them. But both of these options require denying an emotion and shaming yourself for feeling it. Dialectical behavioural therapy states that both of these feelings can exist at the same time, and that the only way to find peace with them is to hold them both as equally true and acting to satisfy them both.
Which brings us back to Yuya. Yuya's shame comes from the contradiction of his love for entertainment dueling vs his community's rejection of it. He was previously dealing with this contradiction by publicly treating his love for entertainment as a silly joke to be mocked by everyone, including himself, while appreciating entertainment dueling only in secret. This changes in his duel with Strong Ishijima when he tries to resolve the contradiction by openly and proudly entertainment dueling against a respected pro to change the public's mind about it.
Arc-V continues to push Yuya from there by ramping up the reasons why people might reject dueling for fun. Maybe they have a social status they're trying to maintain. Maybe they're part of a rival school who thinks abusing their students and depriving them of fun will make them better at winning. Maybe they're victims of a genocide whose only means of self-defense is dueling. Maybe they live in an economically segregated society where dueling to win is their only reliable way to become financially stable. Maybe they're part of a fascist military organisation which has taught them that the only point of dueling is for the strong to eliminate the weak.
The reason why people in this show can't prove Yuya's smile ideology wrong is because it's not wrong. Life IS meant to be lived for happiness, and while that might be in contradiction with the situations many of the characters find themselves in, the show is making the case that the contradiction is not an invalidation. Being the victim of abuse or economic oppression or genocide doesn't mean you shouldn't fight to defend yourself, but it also doesn't mean you should give up on creating a future where you're able to smile again. Likewise, creating a future where you're able to smile shouldn't mean blinding yourself to what needs to be done to protect yourself long enough for that to happen. This is literally why Reiji exists as Yuya's rival. Reiji understands the sacrifices that are necessary to fight a war, Yuya understands that the only good reason to fight a war is to create a world where everyone can be happy again. Yuya isn't able to defeat Reiji at the end of the Standard Dimension arc because his entertainment dueling isn't enough and Reiji's way is still required, but Reiji still includes him in the mission because he respects Yuya's idealism.
People get salty about Yuya invalidating the anger of people like Kurosaki, Shinji and Kaito, but I don't think that's what he's doing. All of those characters have justifiable anger but none of them are working towards a world where everyone can be happy. Kurosaki is just going around killing random people in another, completely uninvolved dimension. Shinji has no plan for what comes after his revolution. Kaito is just killing random Academia grunts even though it's not going to end the war. People complain about how annoying the child characters are but they serve the purpose of showing what world is being created for them. Crow is onboard with Shinji's rebellion until he's reminded that the Tops have children too, and the rebellion is likely to leave them in the same position he and his kids were in. Kaito defeats literally every Lancer in the Xyz dimension and is about to murder his best friend until he sees a child crying about it and blaming herself, and finally decides to show mercy. I get how people might hate this if they've had their anger invalidated a lot, I sure did when I watched Arc-V for the first time, but this really resonated with me after doing DBT and learning how to find the secret third way of doing things.
I'm not trying to shame anyone for their interpretations of Arc-V. Partly because that's how I interpreted it at first, partly because a show that leaves people with a message it didn't intend definitely deserves criticism for that, but mostly because in the spirit of dialectics, a show can have many interpretations and can be both good and bad at the same time. My only goal for this post is to help some people see the show the way I did because I had more fun watching the show through this lens and I want people to have fun
turnnoffyourmind
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